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Masterpieces from Agnes Gund’s Collection Will Headline Christie’s May Marquee Auctions

A trio of works by Rothko, Twombly and Joseph Cornell is expected to achieve $145 million.

The passing of Agnes Gund in September 2025 marked not only a tragic loss for the art world but also the end of an era defined by her unique brands of patronage. A tireless advocate for art and culture, Gund was one of the most influential U.S. patrons of the past half-century (earning a spot on Observer’s 2023 Art Power Index). As president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, where she served for over 11 years, she played a transformative role in expanding the museum’s reach and collection, directly helping to raise the funds that made its most recent expansion possible.

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In her relentless collecting, Gund amassed an impressive trove of masterpieces. Had she chosen to retain them, they would likely be worth “billions,” potentially surpassing the $1.6 billion estate of Microsoft founder Paul Allen, which Christie’s sold in 2022—the highest-priced estate ever auctioned. Instead, Gund donated 1,500 works to museums and sold others to fund causes like criminal justice reform and reproductive rights.

Now, Christie’s is set to auction three museum-grade masterpieces, some of her favorites that she kept close to her until her last days. After hanging in her apartment for years, within view of her favorite white sofa, these works will be sold as the centerpiece of Christie’s May Marquee Week in New York, with a combined expected value of $145 million.

The top lot is Rothko’s monumental canvas No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), a rare example from his later period, where he uses cold greens, blacks, and deep indigo with a contrasting red stripe. This work, painted six years after Rothko shifted to darker, brooding tones, is one of the largest from this period still in private hands. It has a remarkable provenance: purchased directly from Rothko by Gund in 1967 during a visit to his studio, it is one of only seven paintings acquired directly from the artist that remain with their original buyer. With an estimate of around $80 million, it may surpass the previous record of $86.88 million set by Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) at Christie’s in 2012. In the psychological and emotional density of its atmospheric presence, the canvas evokes the profound emotional depth of Rothko’s work: a shifting, infinite horizon of a forest or Nordic seaside traversed by this contrasting vibrant red, in an interplay of color that gestures both to intimacy and an overwhelming vastness.

The second high-value lot is Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1961), an exemplary piece from his Rome period, known for his expressive, graffiti-like mark-making, where the artist’s spontaneous and powerful gestural language reached new heights during this transformative phase, inspired by the myths and energies absorbed in the city. This work, with its unrestrained swirls of emotion and vivid bursts of color, shows all the urgency and rawness of self-expression—an embodiment of Twombly’s quest to reach the subconscious through the tangible physical presence of our body-bounded experience of reality.

The third gem is Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Medici Princess) (1948), a part of his famous Medici series. The box, which contains an image of a Medici princess, is a perfect example of Cornell’s ability to blend surrealism, abstraction, and personal history into enigmatic assemblages that resonate with the collective subconscious. The work shows Cornell’s ability to poetically assemble diverse objects into a mesmerizing suspended world where dots are unexpectedly connected and the universal sense of time, collective history, and personal memory converge—an invitation to step into a tangible reflection of our shared subconscious. With an estimate of $3-5 million, it is expected to exceed the previous high of $2.1 million achieved at Christie’s in 2014.

While this isn’t the first time Gund’s collection has been put on the market, she always notably used art sales to fund causes she believed in. In 2017, she famously sold her beloved Roy Lichtenstein masterpiece to hedge fund investor Steven Cohen for $165 million, using the funds to launch Art for Justice, a six-year initiative targeting racial inequities in mass incarceration. The fund distributed over $127 million in grants before sunsetting in 2023. “Agnes is not done,” Helena Huang, Art for Justice’s project director, told Observer at the time, noting Gund’s growing focus on reproductive rights.

In November 2023, Gund sold another Lichtenstein, directing more than $2 million to the Groundswell Fund, which advocates for reproductive rights. “She would say that there’s less art to sell,” Huang said when asked whether Gund would sell more works for charity. “But she’ll continue to leverage everything she has.”

As reported by the New York Times, Christie’s secured Gund’s estate with a financial guarantee, agreeing to pay a minimum price for the collection in advance, and all proceeds from this auction will be used to cover the costs associated with the estate. These high-stakes consignments, along with others expected to be announced, promise to further boost market confidence—at least in the secondary market—continuing the momentum seen after the record-breaking $527.5 million Lauder Collection sale in November.

SEE ALSO: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping the Global Art Ecosystem

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